“Blackmail.”
“Who? Moi? Surely you don’t think I’d stoop—”
Melrose regarded him through narrow eyes. “To anything.”
“Okay, I will certainly admit I was very upset—mad as hell, I expect, that day at Stonington. I drove all the way to Salisbury to wander around Old Sarum, that godforsaken ruin. Well, that was the case we were working on then. And I met this chap who works there. He reminded me of Othello’s rush to judgment over Desdemona. All Othello saw was a handkerchief.” He smiled at Melrose. “You can’t rush to judgment over a handkerchief, can you? Or a napkin?” Jury waved it back and forth, at the same time running his eyes over the ceiling, one corner to another. “And we’re forgetting something, aren’t we?”
“What?”
“It’s not our decision. It’s hers. Whether she fancies one or the other of us—or even Max Owen. That’s her decision. We’re being pretty macho if we think it’s ours.”
Melrose felt a great weight lift; he breathed more easily. For that was true. It wasn’t their decision. He raised his glass. “Friends again?”
Jury raised his. “Always have been, far as I’m concerned. But there’s one thing I do have to say.”
Jury’s expression was grim as he sat looking at the ceiling, and Melrose felt a frisson of anxiety. “Yes, what?”
“For an earl you’ve got a hell of a lot of cobwebs up there.”
5
A drop of this and I’ll be right as rain,” said Wiggins, tap-tapping a spoon against his cup.
Richard Jury looked up from the small pink message slips scrambled on his blotter and wondered what on earth had brought his sergeant to this state of sanguinity. The sergeant had never been “right as rain” in all the long years of their association. He was getting smug, really. Wiggins could be insufferably smug. Well, there wasn’t going to be any con-sanguinity on the part of Jury. He flicked a glance the sergeant’s way and saw Wiggins was stirring something in a glass, something thick, amber, and medicinal. Wiggins stirred slowly and thoughtfully.
Waiting for him to comment, thought Jury. If there was anything Jury didn’t feel, it was “sanguine.” Still sorting through his call slips, he could feel Wiggins’s eyes on him, boring into his carefully constructed silence. Of course, Wiggins’s announcement—for it had all of the gravitas of an engraved card or a black-edged telegram—was supposed to call forth an astonished gasp, or at least an eyebrow raised in query.
Getting neither, Wiggins stopped stirring and tapped his spoon again on the rim of his cup in regular beats that had the curious effect of sounding like a censer, shaking down clouds of bells or raindrop tinkles. Jury wouldn’t have been too surprised to find the air perfumed with incense. Wiggins’s complaints usually took on the tincture of ritual and religiosity. Now, he was sighing. Heavily. “So what’s got you in such a life-affirming mood?” asked Jury, giving in.
Wiggins gave him a smile like the weak crescent of a waning moon. “Life-affirming? Oh, no, it’s just Vera has made me see that sometimes I talk myself into feeling under the weather.”
Vera? Jury looked at Wiggins. “Vera?”
“Vera Lillywhite.”
Jury frowned. Nurse Lillywhite? “You mean Nurse Lillywhite?”
“Well, she has got a first name.” Wiggins seemed affronted.
“Yes, but you never use it.” Did this mean the relationship had shifted to ground farther up?
From a thermos Wiggins poured an amber-colored, thickish liquid into the cup to which he’d just dropped some feathery-looking stuff and assured Jury that yes, he and Vera had got to know one another rather well.
Jury remembered Nurse Lillywhite as a plumpish, rather pretty woman of unfailingly happy temperament. Well, you’d have to have a pleasant temperament, wouldn’t you, to take on Wiggins’s ills. Taking care of Wiggins was no small matter. There were, to begin, his complex ailments; that is, what Wiggins thought were his ailments—all of them fairly minor, but in such numbers they would war with one another, so that a flare-up of catarrh would exacerbate a fit of ague. Wiggins claimed to suffer from these medieval conditions, ones that Jury thought had been stamped out with the Black Death.
Jury quoted: “ ‘Oh, Gertrude, Gertrude, when ailments come, they come not single file, but in battalions.’ ” At Wiggins’s deep frown, Jury said, “Just quoting Claudius. You know, Hamlet’s Claudius. Except there it was sorrows. ‘When sorrows come.’ ” But Shakespeare only served to remind him of Stratford-upon-Avon and Jenny Kennington. He turned glum again.
Then Wiggins said, “Anyway, Vera’s got me off a lot of my medications—”
Oh really? Then what’s in those two bottles and what’s that orange swill in your thermos?
“—and onto a health regimen. Vera believes in a holistic approach, you know, treating the whole person.”
“Were you only treating parts before?”
Wiggins uncapped one of the bottles and dropped something into the stuff in his glass that made it fizz. Bromo-Seltzer, probably, thought Jury. He’d been addicted to the stuff ever since the Baltimore trip.
Wiggins said, “I’m trying to be serious, sir.”
“Sorry.” Jury watched him twirl the cap back on the bottle, the movement of his fingers annoyingly lithe and balletic. A man without woman problems. Jury felt even more depressed.
“I’d think you’d be pleased. After all, it’s you who’ve suffered as much as me.”
Nobody could suffer as much as Wiggins. But Jury was touched by his considering the possibility. “Holistic. Is that the medicine made of beet tops and things like that?”
“You’re thinking of ‘homeopathic.’ ”
Psychopathic was more like it, he thought, as he watched Wiggins’s glass sneeze up a spray of bubbles.
“Homeopathic’s this sort of thing.” Wiggins held up a small tube. “Natural medicine is what it is.”
Jury nodded toward the amber glutinous stuff. “What’s that, then?”
“Apricot juice with seafern.” Wiggins held the glass up as if toasting or blessing the office and tossed the lot back. He set down the glass with an aaahh as if he were a sailor who’d just had a shot of overproof rum.
Jury had to admit listening to Wiggins was in itself pretty good therapy. It took his mind off things, since he felt like strangling him a lot of the time and that used up energy that might instead have been consumed by brooding over Jenny Kennington.
This morning he had had a message from Jenny, but not in person. The message had come via Carole-anne Palutski, which was a whole different thing. It was akin to no message at all. What Jenny had really said and what Carole-anne said Jenny had said was the difference between chalk and cheese.
That morning Jury had opened his door to find the dog Stone sitting there with a pink slip in his mouth like a second tongue.
This was Carole-anne’s new way of delivering phone messages to Jury that she hoped would get lost, or drooled all over, or even eaten before Jury had a chance to read them. Messages that got this treatment were from women that Carole-anne didn’t know and therefore couldn’t approve and wouldn’t approve if she did know them, since Superintendent Jury wasn’t to move, woman-wise, beyond the circle of his Islington digs.
The caramel-colored Labrador lived on the floor above between Jury and Carole-anne. Clearly the message had come last night or earlier this morning when he’d been out and Carole-anne was in, in meaning in his, Jury’s, flat. Instead of writing it down and leaving it beside the phone as any normal person would have done, she had taken it up to her own flat, elaborated to the point of indecipherableness—Jury strained his eyes, cursing the tiny handwriting—and then had given it to the dog to deliver. Shortly after the dog’s appearance, Carole-anne herself had come running down the stairs, a blob of brilliant blue and red-gold, hurrying off to work, sorry, Super, got to run—when he had tried to stop her about the message.
Irritated beyond belief, Jury had put the kettle on and then tried
through squinty eyes and reading glasses to get some sense out of it:
Afraid please may come from links mix own fungus
and blank, blank, blank—impossible to read at all—then
Straightforward to rest.
and the rest of it a little black-ink melting pot. Wait’ll he got Carole-anne alone.
He went back over it. Afraid he understood. Was the next word please? “Please come.” No, “police,” that was it. So it must be Lincs police-something. Mix own. Jury scratched his head. Max Owen! that must be it. But it still didn’t make sense. Fungus. Fun . . . oh, for God’s sake, “Fengate.” Had Carole-anne been right there, he’d probably have throttled her.
Yet, the other messages she’d taken last night were clear as crystal and in block letters:
INSPECTOR SAM LASKO CALLED AND CLEANERS CALLED ABOUT YOUR SWEATER THEY RUND.
Had Jury not been privy to the cleaner’s having spilled dye on his sweater, he would have been at a loss over RUND. Stone watched as Jury tried to squint up the words in the Jenny-message. He knew the reason for what seemed like paragraphs of writing: recently he had complained that a message from Jenny had translated by Carole-anne into “ZILCH.” So now she was writing everything she could think of in this tiny little misspelled hand. Fortunately, the kettle whistled before he went daft or blind.
Stone followed him into the kitchen where Jury dashed some loose tea into the teapot. He muttered, “ ‘Straightforward, straightforward . . . ’ ” He looked up. Stratford! My God. Who else but Carole-anne could manage that interpretation? “To Stratford to rest.” Jury held up the pot and said to Stone: “Shall I be Mother?”
The dog appeared to nod.
Maybe Jury should give the message to Stone to interpret.
Though he was afraid he knew what “to rest” meant.
• • •
Wiggins’s voice brought him out of this reverie. “You should try some of Vera’s remedies, sir. Really, I’ve felt quite free of symptoms the last week or two. Like having a holiday by the sea.” He breathed deeply, as if inhaling the air on Brighton’s pebbled beach.
Jury shook his head. He failed to see the effect of Nurse Lillywhite’s nostrums, but he supposed the point was that Wiggins saw it. Perhaps that’s all change meant: rearrangement. If you stopped being addicted to Bromo-Seltzer and black biscuits, you’d become addicted to apricot juice and seafern. Addictive personalities, that’s what he and Wiggins were. Hadn’t had a smoke now for a month (well, three weeks, well nineteen days—oh, who was he kidding; he knew it down to the insufferable hour!). Now, what was this new addiction? To lethargy, probably. He found it difficult to move.
The ringing of the phone made him jump.
“Fiona,” said Wiggins as he replaced the receiver. “Says you’re to come round to see the guv’nor. When he gets back from his club.”
“And just when will that be?”
Wiggins shrugged.
• • •
Fiona Clingmore sat behind her desk with the patience of Job, waiting, apparently, for whatever she had on her face to turn her into Madonna. What she had on her face looked like thick layers of cling film or one of those clear plastic masks. A face under ice, static and frozen.
“Hullo, Fiona. Cyril.” Jury nodded toward the copper-colored cat Cyril, who sat in regal splendor, tail coiled about his paws, with equal patience, as if he too were embalmed in ice. Cyril, Jury thought, could beat all of them in the looks department. “What’s that stuff?”
Fiona had begun to peel away the mask, starting at her forehead. She couldn’t answer (beyond saying something like “um buh mau allah”) with the mask still around her mouth; she held up a pale yellow and white jar with a label that read Pearlift. Finally free of this youth-giving anodyne, Fiona said, “It’s a lift. If you take the regular course of treatments—that’d be two a week—it’ll take years off. See?” She turned her face this way and that.
Fiona looked exactly the same. “Beautiful.”
“It’s a new discovery. It’s got crushed oyster shell in it, which they say tightens the pores and firms you.”
“I’ve always thought oysters looked surprisingly wrinkle-free.”
Fiona sniffed as she plucked lipstick and eyeliner from her sponge bag. “You can laugh. You’re a man. Disgusting the way so many men just get better-looking as they get older. Look at Sean Connery, for instance. But women, they just go downhill. Name me one woman—one—you can say looks better with age.” She applied eyeliner as Cyril, who had sprung up to her desk, stalked the sponge bag.
“Mrs. Wassermann?”
Fiona put down the liner. “You mean that grandmum type that lives in your building? How old’s she, then?”
“Seventy-five, around.”
Fiona frowned. “Well, how old was she when you first saw her?”
“I don’t know. Sixty? Sixty-five?” Jury shrugged.
“Well that doesn’t count, for heaven’s sake.”
“Why not? She looks better. You said—”
“Oh, stop. Come on, I want to show you something.”
Jury followed Fiona into Racer’s office. Cyril followed Jury.
The thing that Jury’s eye first lit on was a wire cage that resembled the sort the air carriers used for transporting animals. “What the hell’s that?”
“You watch,” said Fiona, winding up the mechanical coyote that Jury had brought back from Santa Fe and which (for some reason Jury couldn’t imagine) was sitting on the desk blotter of Chief Superintendent Racer—or, as Wiggins liked to call him, “the guv’nor.”
Fiona set the little coyote, tightly wound, on the floor. It zipped off, making straight for the cage.
It didn’t take much intelligence to work out that Cyril was supposed to be in hot pursuit of the toy coyote.
Cyril yawned.
“Well, of course,” said Fiona, “that cat’s bored with it already.”
Jury was over examining the cage. Inside was a small dish with something oily in it, tinned herring, perhaps. He reached his hand in and the cage fell down on his wrist. Another of Racer’s Cyril-traps. Jury shook his head. “Then what? Racer calls British Airways and sends the cat to Siberia?”
“Can you believe he’d think Cyril’s so stupid he’d fall for something like that? I don’t know what the point is.”
Jury was looking at the mechanical coyote. “What’s he got on here, a magnet?”
Fiona nodded. “And hitched one to the cage, too. So the coyote—”
“Keep away from the sardines, Jury,” said the voice of Chief Superintendent Racer, who at that moment was coming through the door. “If you want lunch, there’s a caff down the street.”
Seeing Racer, Cyril’s tail began twitching. His head swiveled. Mobilizing his forces, thought Jury. Cyril turned and streaked out of the office.
“You wanted to see me?” Jury settled into the chair on the other side of the big desk, the mendicant’s side.
Racer’s smile was carved in ivory. “Not especially.” The smile vanished. “What in hell’s going on with this Danny Wu business? That restaurant’s set up for traffic in drugs and you know it. You’ve been on this for months!”
“Years.” Jury corrected him.
“When am I going to see some results?”
“I expect when you hand it over to the Drug Squad.”
“That Chink restaurateur had a dead body turn up on his doorstep. That’s a homicide, man!”
“Not necessarily related to Mr. Wu.” Jury sighed. “It’s pretty much a dead end.”
“Trouble with you is you want it handed to you on a platter. You need a bit more tenacity!” Racer waved him out of the office. Out of his life would have been too much to hope for.
When Jury got back to his own office, Wiggins was turning from the phone and mouthing something, a name that Jury couldn’t make out; his heart lurched. Hoping to hear Jenny’s voice, he grabbed for the receiver.
“I’ve been trying to get hold o
f you, where’ve you been?” Sam Lasko sounded a little affronted.
“In Lincolnshire, that’s where.” Jury wiped his hand over the message slips—yes, there were two from Lasko. “I didn’t see the message until today.”
“I’d’ve thought you’d be contacting me, anyway.”
“She rang me but I can’t get her on the phone.” He did not think of identifying the “her.” Who else could they be talking about?
“This Lincs policeman—”
“Arthur Bannen?”
“Right. You know there’s been another murder?”
“Yes. That’s why I wanted to know if Jenny was in Stratford.”
“Now, you mean?”
“Then. When the second murder took place.”
Lasko paused. “As far as we know. She says she came back on the Tuesday.”
It was the “as far as we know” that made Jury nervous. “On the fourth.”
“Yes. CI Bannen, the Lincs cop. I have a feeling he’s going to arrest her.”
“I think she has the same feeling.”
“Thought you hadn’t talked to her,” said Lasko.
“I haven’t—oh, never mind.”
There was some talk about police procedure before Lasko rang off.
Jury put down the receiver rather harder than was necessary, causing Wiggins to jump. It was not Jury’s style. “Is it Lady Kennington, then, sir? Is something happening?”
“Something’s going to.” Jury washed his hands over his face.
“You’ll be going to Stratford, then?”
Jury glared. “Friend or not, I can’t just drop everything and run off to Stratford.” He looked again at the pool of pink messages as if they were runes and wondered why he’d said that.
Wiggins looked alarmed. Was this the treatment Jury’s friends could expect from now on?
Jury sat there for a moment, unhappy because Jenny hadn’t asked for his help. But, then, couldn’t that have been the message rendered in Carole-anne’s tiny handwriting? No. “Afraid police may come from Lincs” was more informative than panic-stricken. Jury preferred Carole-anne’s version, after all:
The Case Has Altered Page 5